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AMERICA PREFIGURED 



AN ADDRESS AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
OCTOBER 21, i8g2 



BY/ 



JUSTIN WINSOR 



Fifty copies privately reprinted from the Harvard Graduates' Magazine 
yamiary, i8gj 




CAMBRIDGE 

S^rintcti at tf)e I5iber^:tic ^rc^^ 

1893 



AMERICA PREFIGURED. 

ADDRESS DELIVERED IN APPLETON CHAPEL ON COLUMBUS DAY, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 

21, 1892. 

Under the speU of a great commemoration, a common devo- 
tion to a learned life has brought us here together. We may, 
therefore, well remember that the most successful seaman of our 
day, who has brought learning and practical tests into unison, is 
he who passed from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and laid open the 
long-sought passage by the northeast; who received his incentive 
to such deeds in a professor's chair; and who has placed his 
name beside those of Magellan and Da Gama, the discoverers of 
the great passages by the south, four centuries ago. We may, 
then, pause to pay this tribute to Nordenskiold, the scholar and 
the discoverer, before we enter upon the consideration of some of 
the relations of scholarship and seamanship in the world's great- 
est discovery. 

It was but recently that a new phase of the wisdom of Aristotle 
was evoked from oblivion. It behooves us to-day to recall that 
another phase of that same wisdom, manifested in his successors, 
after eighteen centuries, summoned a new world from a similar 
oblivion. It was this peerless teacher of the ancient time who 

"Bred 
Great Alexander to subdue the world ! " 

and who was also of those who exhausted worlds and then im- 
agined new, leaving it for others to summon these latent realms 
from the deep for men to occupy. 

Down through the ages, with their darkness and light, this 
large circumspection passed from one to another, as men unrolled 
the papyrus and kept alive the vision upon which we dwell to- 
day. It was English blood, pulsating in the brain of an Oxford 
teacher in the thirteenth century, which gave to science the illus- 
trious name of Roger Bacon. It was he who brought this wis- 
dom, inherited from Aristotle, to the forefront in an ample phi- 
losophy, and transmitted it to those who were the immediate 
inspirers of Columbus. 

The early years of the fifteenth century were a time when 
mincfe of adventurous speculation grew firmer in the belief that 



4 America Prefigured. 

there was more of the earth than what was known to be inhab- 
ited. In what direction should men turn to increase their know- 
ledo-e of this part which was unknown? Opinions differed, of 
course. Some said to the north, others pointed to the south, but 
the ice of the one and the burning zone of the other daunted the 
boldest. It needed English blood once more, coursing down 
through John of Gaunt to his grandson. Prince Henry the Navi- 
oator, who organized those efforts, directed those energies, and 
inspired that confidence which carried his sailors unscathed 
through the burning belts of the African coast. Year after year 
these doughty Portuguese mariners pushed farther and farther, 
until they doubled the Cape of Good Hope under Vasco da Gama. 
The way to Calicut was now opened, and farther on they came 
to that Cathay which had grown attractive in the descriptions of 
Marco Polo. 

Two results came with scientific precision from this hardy sea- 
manship of the Portuguese, and from the inspiring trust of Prince 
Henry. One was that Da Gama's experience of the ocean winds 
and currents led him to instruct one of his successors on this 
African route to bear away towards the west in order to avoid 
their opposition. Thus it was that Cabral, under these warn- 
ing's, first saw that Brazilian coast which the Bull of Demarcation 
had already confirmed to Portugal. The new world was thus 
found again by an obedience to meteorologic laws. A second 
result from the development of Prince Henry's aims led the 
Portuguese on from Cathay to the Moluccas, and thence across 
the Pacific till they struck the coast of California, there is some 
reason to suppose, before Balboa had crossed the isthmus at 
Darien. So the new world was again found from the east, as it 
had been already from the west, as a natural outcome of a scien- 
tific perception. This is what we owe to Prince Henry and to the 
Portuguese in the revelation of the new world. America was thus 
in a sense rediscovered from the side of Asia, and along the paths 
by which the western continents had been, in part at least, origi- 
nally peopled. 

It fell also to Portugal to be the first to put to practical tests 
that com})lemental theory, which was another part of that large 
comprehension of the cosmographical problem, which had, in the 
main, come down from Aristotle, till it had captured the imagi- 



America Prefigured. 6 

nation of Alfonso of Portugal and of Toscanelli in Florence. 
This other and complemental theory likewise depended upon a 
belief in the sphericity of the earth, — a belief which was ancient 
in the time when Greek science was at its best, and which wise 
men had never ceased to cherish through all the ages. It held to 
an extension of the habitable globe east and west, which was as 
necessary as one to the north and south. The champion of this 
belief in the middle years of the fifteenth century, seeking to 
evolve practical tests to the scholar's dream, was Alfonso, King of 
Portugal. Before Prince Henry died, in 1460, this monarch had 
already entered upon the demonstration of this theory, which 
was to find partial vindication in 1492, and a completed one 
under Magellan thirty years later. 

Sixty years and more earlier than the fateful voyage of Colum- 
bus, the great island of Antillia, the nominal forerunner of the 
Antilles, and the prototype of the New World, had appeared for 
the first time conspicuously on the map of Bianco. It may have 
been but the result of vague notions to set an ominous land in 
the midst of that darksome sea. It may have been the result of 
actual contact, helped by the natural instinct which gives im- 
aginary details to oceanic voids. We may never know the truth. 
Certain it is, there was something more than a dream, when as 
early as 1457, and thirty years before the little fleet of crazy 
ships crawled out of the harbor of Palos on that August morning, 
four centuries ago, this Portuguese king authorized a western 
voyage of discovery. We have distinct proofs, which repeated 
researches in the Archives at Lisbon have revealed of late years, 
that before the intervention of Toscanelli in 1474, Alfonso caused 
other expeditions for western search to be dispatched. They all, 
through stress of weather or faint-heartedness in the seamen, 
failed in those actual results which are associated with the name 
of Columbus. They were the forerunners, presaging what was 
to come in the ripeness of time. 

Amid the surging emotions of men in these years of the great- 
est geographical development which the world has ever known, 
there were two turning-points in men's progress, of which we 
must not forget the influence. They both helped to lead men 
to the finding of the new lands and to the removing of clouds 
about them. They were movements that were independent of 



6 America Prefigured. 

individual action. They were combined forces in inevitable 
progress. 

The first of these was the then young art of printing, which, 
in placing the old philosophers and cosmographers in the hands 
of many, created that public opinion which is always necessary 
to sustain great strides of onwardness, — public opinion concen- 
trated in master minds. In the second place, we must credit 
what I will not call the rising spirit of the Reformation, but 
rather a revulsion among the faithful of the Church to the inor- 
dinate pretensions, not of papal authority, but of the temporary 
incumbents of the Holy Seat. It was this revulsion which put 
the Spanish acquiescence in the Bull of Demarcation in expedi- 
ency, rather than in faithful obedience. It was this disregard of 
papal control that pushed the meridian of separation farther to 
the west, so that Portuguese names were placed on the headlands 
of Newfoundland and Brazil. England had for a century or 
more insisted on emancipating herself from the papal supervision, 
as to the occupation of new lands ; and this same independence 
now sent John Cabot to the discovery of our own shores. But 
in the midst of all this reaction, the Church found an unabated 
constancy in Columbus, which forbade his conforming to the 
treaty of Tordesillas, and made him to his death stand faith- 
ful to the power of the Pope, as manifested in the Bull of De- 
marcation. 

I have said that from 1474 we trace the cardinal influence of 
Toscanelli, the famous Florentine astronomer, — the same upon 
whose meridian line athwart the pavement of the Duomo at Flor- 
ence the traveler gazes to-day. Let us glance a moment into the 
library of that learned man, in his palace upon the Arno, and see 
him sitting there, with the white hairs of nearly fourscore years 
flowing from beneath a velvet skull-cap and spreading upon his 
bended shoulders. Mark the apparatus which encumbers the 
apartment, — the hanging globe, which men of his kind had 
never failed to understand ; the astrolabe, upon which Regiomon- 
tanus had expended his ingenuity; the lunar tables, which the 
eager mariners, inspired by confidence in the compass derived 
from the Levant, had long carried to sea, beyond the Pillars of 
Hercules. Look at those heavy tomes on his table, as he bows 



America Prefigured. 7 

above them, and we find them to be the "De Situ Orbis" of 
Strabo, who had revived the views of Aristotle in the first cen- 
tury, and whose "Geography" had now only recently come from 
the press; the astronomical poem of Manilius, damp from the 
types; and the "Polyhistor" of Solinus. The " Cosmographia " 
of Ptolemy was the single work of all the great geographers dis- 
played in manuscript, for it was not till the following year that 
Sixtus the Fifth ordered that it should be put to press. These, 
with Aristotle and Seneca, were the companions of that old man's 
studious hours. Out of them all, by comparison and deduction, 
he had raised a vision of the shores of Cathay, lying over against 
the coast of Spain. 

It was to this man, thus surrounded in that Florentine palace, 
that there came one day in 1474 a missive in the interests of 
King Alfonso, then, as we have seen, struggling with the great 
problem, and asking its explanation of this Italian sage. Our 
American students have only very recently been made aware, 
how, at a later day, the Emperor Maximilian urged precisely the 
same views upon Alfonso's successor. King John; and how they 
were enforced by a learned Dr. Miinzmeister, of the imperial 
city of Nuremberg, in an epistle to the same King John, written 
in apparent ignorance of Columbus and his urgency. This is the 
more strange, as Martin Behaim, who had just then made his 
famous globe in that city, was seemingly a friend of this cosmo- 
grapher, and a fellow-advocate of a western voyage. This letter 
of Miinzmeister goes a great way to show that the needy Genoese 
adventurer, who had been hanging about the shipping on the 
Tagus, had had no intercourse with the most famous cosmo- 
grapher then living in the Portuguese capital. 

So the belief in a western passage was in the air, and wherever 
learning had given to men a habit of expansion and insight, the 
outcome was foreseen. The cosmographical theory needed a 
man who could dare to make it a fact. 

To the letter of the Portuguese sovereign, Toscanelli replied 
by sending to him that map which corresponded probably very 
nearly to what has come down to us in the Behaim globe. 
Though Las Casas had it, the map has disappeared, and he tells 
us that it exemplified the oceanic theory that placed Asia over 
against Spain. The map was accompanied by a letter enforcing 



8 America Prefigured. 

these views, which had sprung from collating the opinions of 
learned men from the days of Aristotle. This letter has not 
come down to us in the hand of its writer; but the original Latin, 
copied by Columbus himself on the flyleaf of a book in the rem- 
nant of the library of his son, Ferdinand Columbus, is preserved 
in Seville. The receipt of this letter from Toscanelli was simply 
a confirmation of the views which Alfonso had been acting upon 
in authorizing explorations towards the west. How long after 
1474 it was, when a similar communication reached Columbus, is 
in dispute. The future admiral had only recently come to Lis- 
bon, and it is a question if he had earlier come in contact with 
the theories which were now having a new interest for the learned. 
Mr. Clements R. Markham, perhaps the best informed of English- 
men in this field, has within a month or two expressed his belief 
that Columbus had pondered on these views before leaving Savona 
in 1473, but it is an opinion which he does not claim to substan- 
tiate by proofs. He reaches his conclusion by supposing that it 
was but a short time after Alfonso had received his communica- 
tion from Toscanelli, and in the same year, 1474, that Columbus, 
acting upon the reports of Toscanelli 's views, himself wrote to 
the Florentine patriarch and asked anew for his opinions, — a 
proof that the letter to Alfonso had not actually come, in its com- 
pleteness, to the attention of Columbus, but that he had heard 
enough of it to desire to learn more from him who wrote it. 

The exact time when Columbus got his response from Florence 
depends on the interpretation to be given to a phrase which Tos- 
canelli added to this new missive. When the old philosopher 
received, from this unknown correspondent in Lisbon, a request 
for a repetition of his views, he replied by sending a copy of his 
letter to Alfonso's secretary, adding to it that it had been origi- 
nally written "before the wars in Castile." The date of his com- 
munication with the Genoese depends upon the meaning of these 
words, since the indorsement on the copy had no date. The most 
eminent living authority on questions of this kind, Henry Har- 
risse, an American long resident in Paris, understands it to mean, 
contrary to the view of Mr. Markham, that this communication 
to Columbus followed, as that to Alfonso had preceded, the wars 
which were ended in 1479. It was by this treaty between Spain 
and Portugal that Spain was awarded the Canaries and the right 



America Prefigured. 9 

to explore to the west, and Portugal was given the exclusive 
privilege of sailing down the coast of Africa. 

I must confess that the weight of probability is altogether in 
favor of the opinion expressed by Harrisse, which woidd place 
the forming of the ambitious hopes of Columbus, under the incen- 
tive of Toscanelli, not far from the year 1479. Thus it was thir- 
teen years before the final fruition in 1492, that the theory of a 
westward extension found in this Italian wanderer a courageous 
adherent destined to work out its solution. 

It must be borne in mind that the papal authority had in sev- 
eral bulls, previous to this date, confirmed to Portugal the rights 
of exploration out upon the Sea of Darkness. It was not only 
the overweening demands of Columbus for territorial sway, but 
the content of the Portuguese king with what he was doing and 
hoped to do under these papal permissions, that induced the final 
rejection by that power of Columbus's importunities. So the 
expatriated Genoese, forced to extremities, and with unswerving 
allegiance to the idea which now possessed him, deserted friends, 
creditors, and wife. He clandestinely crossed the frontier, and 
set about his suit for recognition in Spain. 

It is a familiar story, full of doubts and complications, which 
it is not my purpose now to dwell upon. Queen Isabella was 
won; King Ferdinand simply acquiesced, much to his later 
regret; and the portentous voyage was made! Columbus was 
borne along by the supposition that the distance to be traversed 
was much shorter than it really was, and this misconception luck- 
ily supplied a large part of the attendant courage. 

By a stroke of fortune which seems to recognize ' the preemp- 
tion of Portugal, with a single ship left to his direction, out of 
his three, bearing his great message, Columbus sought refuge 
from a storm in the port of Lisbon, carrying back to Portugal 
the answer to the vast problem, which Alfonso and Toscanelli 
had set down on the page of history. It has only very recently 
been made clear that Portugal grasped the realized conception 
with great alacrity, and even before Columbus was received by 
Ferdinand and Isabella at Barcelona, a messenger of the Portu- 
guese king had reached Rome with tidings of the discovery. 
Here he was when the Spanish messengers arrived, waiting about 
the Holy Seat, intent to protect the interests of Portugal under 



10 America Prefigured. 

earlier guaranties of the Papacy. Hence the promptness of Pope 
Alexander's response in the Bull of Demarcation in May, 1493. 

Fortunately the exhilarated mind of Columbus was just what 
was needed to show that what the world is accustomed to call 
f oolhardiness could be sublimated by success ; but it was a success 
that was dependent not only on faith, but upon striking good for- 
tune. If Columbus, in his cock-boats, had really reached the 
dominions of the Asiatic potentates, it is a question if he had 
lived to repeat his tale. If a flight of parrots had not induced . 
him to change his course, he might have struck the Florida shores. 
Here he would have encountered the ferocious natives of that 
coast, which later Spaniards knew too well. If the fate of Colum- 
bus had been like theirs, it is not improbable that Cabral would 
have occupied in history the proud designation of the Discoverer 
of America, and eight years hence we should have been engaged « 
with Portugal in the grand ceremonials in which Spain this year 
fortuitously shares. As it happened, Columbus, in making his 
landfall among the Bahamas, and in coursing the island shores of 
so inoffensive a race as the Lucayans, was subjected to no such 
dangers, and triumphantly returned to repeat the most imposing 
story in profane history. 

I began with crediting to the ancient Greeks the origin of that 
cosmographical study whose fruition was ultimately found in a 
new world. Let us turn now to that other ancient people. If 
the world-maps of Strabo and Ptolemy had not given the space 
almost entirely to land, the Romans might not have been so 
wholly engrossed by their land conquests. If the dominion which 
they held in the world had passed to their rivals, the Carthagin- 
ians, with their maritime ambition, the revelations of the Atlan- 
tic might not have been delayed so long. If the Romans failed 
in this supremacy by sea, their descendants acquired it. 

Two centuries before Columbus, Dante had looked upon the 
setting sun as journeying to an unknown world. We have seen 
how Italy, in the fulness of time, gave Toscanelli to the incep- 
tion of this ancient and ardent hope. It was to Italy, too, that 
we owe the wayward zealot, who, kneeling upon the strand of San 
Salvador, chanted the Salve Regina beneath the banner of Cas- 
tile. It was to a Florentine merchant that we owe those graphic 



America Prefigured. 11 

descriptions of the Brazilian coasts, with the lifting of the South- 
ern Cross to wondering eyes, making a theme so fascinating that 
relentless Fate has made us to-day Americans and not Colum- 
bians. It was to Verrazzano, another Italian, that France owed a 
claim to our Atlantic seaboard, that it was not in French nature 
to make good in the face of that other claim, which still another 
Italian, John Cabot, established for the greatest of all colonizing 
peoples. We are here to-day by virtue of the might which is in 
English blood, generously mixed with, and not weakened by, a 
suffusion from the veins of every people beneath the sun. 

Spain, France, and England were thus the great claimants of 
this western land. It was the lot of Spain that she sought gold 
in the tropics, and she fell behind in the race for power, which 
depends on character and not on gold. It was the lot of France 
that she sought to plant a decaying feudalism amid the sterility 
of the north, and she lost in the conflict with nature and her 
rivals. It was the lot of England to place her Cavaliers on the 
Chesapeake and her Roundheads on Massachusetts Bay. The 
spirits of these indomitable English, reinforced by what could 
affiliate in other stocks, found the gaps of the AUeghanies, 
poured along the watercourses of the interior, scaled the passes of 
the Rockies ; and as a new product of amalgamated races, bound 
as one under the principles of the English common law, they 
have determined the character of our Pacific coast, from Alaska 
to Santa Barbara. 

And all this has been done under the pioneering of Italy, heir 
of her elder sister, by the ^Egean. Let us not to-day, in this 
academic atmosphere, forget what the world owes to the learning 
and to the prescience of Aristotle, Roger Bacon, and Toscanelli, 
illumined by the dauntlessness and unexampled seamanship of 
Columbus. 

Justin Winsor, '53. 



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